"Nothing but the rain"
Took a trip to Capel-Le-Ferne today to visit the Battle Of Britain Memorial on the cliff top. It’s a sombre place and should make people remember the death and destruction that war causes.
There are two mock up fighters at the site too. I’ve got the hurricane pictured below:
Also, the view of Folkestone is pretty good too.
In the distance you can just make out Dungerness nuclear power station!
I have a complaint. This own’t surprise anyone. I’m pretty sure most communications within this website are complaints or me moaning or ranting on about something reasonably inconsequential. I’ve a feeling most people will think I’m just a little bit over the top on this one. It IS a valid complaint though.
Feast your eyes on this:
This clearly looks like a roundabout just south of Rugby. Here is another view of the “roundabout” within Google Maps:
It looks like a roundabout doesn’t it? How about these signs [stolen from Google Street View], these clearly show a roundabout:
Here’s the thing. IT’S NOT A FUCKING ROUNDABOUT. A roundabout means you give way to traffic from the right as you approach. Look at the following picture:
The road markings CLEARLY show that traffic on the NOT ROUNDABOUT has to give way to traffic approaching the NOT ROUNDABOUT.
The first time I drove this I nearly hit cars. You see the signs and you subconsciously know what is going to happen. Except it doesn’t because it’s NOT A ROUNDABOUT.
I’ll be going for a run soon to rid myself of stress and anger. Don’t even get me started on Cameron saying this country has christian values, Tony Blair saying shit about the middle east or the pope calling for world peace while his establishment STILL covers up priests who fuck kids and hasn’t handed over information to the police so these bastards can be prosecuted.
And, calm [not really].
V8 Speedboat, part of the March collection.
I took a trip to Electrowerkz to see Hocico with Smith. I’ve been to Electrowerkz a number of times, I really like it. It would have been good to stay for the Slimelight club but I had some stuff on early the next day and so we left after the gig.
First up were Spawn Of Psychosis.
This was the best shot I could be bothered to try and get of the band. They were shit. Seriously, they were terrible. The guitar solos were painful and the rest of the band didn’t do much better. Perhaps they’d just had a bad day but I really wouldn’t want to see them again. Having just googled their name it turns out they are from Maidstone, my nearest town. That’s a shame. I don’t think even my local interest would have saved this review!
The next band were called Biomechanimal. Here’s the best shot I have of them:
These guys were better. Much better. The songs were quite enjoyable. I can’t remember any specifics, which is a shame. Perhaps the terror of the first band hadn’t quite worked its way out of my head.
Finally we were treated to Hocico. These two guys are cousins from Mexico. Their music seems reasonable, but the vocals are quite distorted on the studio albums so I wasn’t sure how enjoyable they would be live. Here’s what they look like:
I definitely remember the song “Sex Sick” and some others from the recent album. Overall they were pretty good. The played for 90 minutes which was probably too long. There wasn’t a great deal of variation in their music and beat.
As you can see, I didn’t really go out of my way to try and get great photos. I was concentrating on listening and dancing rather than when to take the best shot. Also, the lighting at Electrowerkz tends to all come from behind the stage, there’s a low ceiling in front, and so it’s quite hard to photo.
The singer of Hocico had plenty of energy and was drinking wine on stage which I don’t think I’ve seen before. At least the wine was offered out to the front row.
Hocico were good and I enjoyed it. The atmosphere was really good. I’m looking forward to seeing them again at M’era Luna, should the timetable allow.
This is Fooyah communication number 900. I can’t believe I have waffled on for so many years or communications. I can guarantee that if you read all my “posts” you would be bored very quickly.
Enjoy.
Not sure this counts as the worst traffic ever, but it does look pretty bad.
I think there must be a site out there with historic traffic data. Will search.
So, stumbled across a snoring cure. You can see the website here. Now, I’m gonna call bullshit on this right now, but that would seem rather unfair to the company so let’s look a little closer at what they claim.
I have screen clipped their website and I will discuss each section. The main page looks like this:
This says that you wear the ring on your little finger and that it is a snoring treatment that is guaranteed to work. Apparently it’s also been clinically tested! They have made a very specific claim here that wearing this ring on your little finger will make you stop snoring. What else do they have to say?
This explains how it works. Or rather it doesn’t. All it says is that there are Acu-activators on the ring. A quick google shows that this isn’t a real term and isn’t used anywhere apart from the stop snoring website.
It’s not looking too good for this product and we’ve not even really started. I think they may be trying to imply that the things on the ring activate acupuncture points? This is irrelevant as acupuncture is clearly bullshit.
Next bit from the www.goodnightsnoring.com website:
Testimonials amount to nothing. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. I don’t care. 3500 years of history can’t be wrong can it? Of course it can. We now use medicine with evidence not rubbish about Chi and acupuncture points. Also, being mentioned in the Daily Fail is not necessarily a good thing. In fact if a medical “cure” is mentioned in the Mail or Express you can pretty much assume it’s bullshit.
Now, the website covers this with the following page:
They claim that a good clinical trial was performed and the results were almost a miracle. This is good because if there is good evidence then I would be prepared to change my mind. The goodnightsnoring.com website doesn’t have a link to the clinical trial. I want to be able to read it and then change my mind. It seems that these are extraordinary claims and so it would be prudent to examine the evidence.
I searched PubMed. There was nothing about the Snoring Ring as being sold here. So I tried searching Google Scholar. Nothing again, just a paper about breast cancer. This was troublesome, my two main sources for scientific papers were showing nada. I decided to look using plain old Google. I searched for “snoring ring clinical trial”.
From these results I wasn’t interested in the Snoring Ring website, there’s nothing on there. I also couldn’t care for a news article in the Daily Fail [they don’t know how to report science]. The other links were mostly places that sell the product and so have probably just got the blurb from a product information release. What interested me originally was the ASA link.
In 2012 a complaint was made to the ASA about the evidence for the claims that the Snoring Ring company were making. The complaint was upheld and the company were told not to make claims about the snoring ring. The so called medical trial was completed after this ruling by the ASA!
Also in the search results was a link to ANTISNOR, a company who produce anti snoring rings. Now, this company mentioned on this page a French company who had done the clinical trials.
In 2012, a French scientific research organisation, Proclaim (www.proclaim.fr), studied the effect of AntiSnor Acupressure Ring . . . .
The Proclaim website doesn’t exist. Even though ANTISNOR link to it. Oh dear, the trail has gone cold.
There are a number of RED FLAGS on the original website. The mention of the following aspects all cause concern. They don’t mean it doesn’t work, they just mean we should be sceptical until we have seen the evidence.
So far, I’ve had some people say they think this work and no actual medical trials even though one is claimed. Back to Google.
Another link from Google heads towards Princeton Consumer Research. It appears that this company will undertake clinical trials for you and then allow you to use the results in your publicity. Here’s a Princeton Brochure with their claims. After finding this I found a company called Aspen Clinical Research. They had a pdf linked here and also Aspen-Clinical-Anti-Snoring-Ring-Media-Coverage1 from my site. This PDF essentially claims that the publicity they managed to produce for the Anti Snoring ring was brilliant. They seem to be more of a PR firm than a clinical trial firm. This makes me very wary.
Aspen Clinical Research even went so far as to persuade the press that there was a National Stop Snoring Week in 2014. This is depressing reading.
I hadn’t realised there would be companies that are willing to be paid to undertake some form of research to legitimise PR claims and also produce media puff.
Both Aspen Clinical Research and Princeton Consumer Research do not seem concerned with legitimate medical trials, rather they concentrate on PR friendly trials to produce media results. Neither of the websites were searchable from their homepages. Also, both companies seem to be offering to pay participants. This can’t be a good thing, it would bias the results. All I want is a copy of the clinical trial for the Anti Snoring Ring and I can’t find it. What I have found are companies who provide easy results for PR.
It seems to me that these companies offer to do science the wrong way around and therefore they don’t offer science. It looks like the cycle goes:
The correct cycle should be:
I feel utterly depressed at the state of media manipulation and that there are companies that do this as their raison d’etre. Everything we see and hear is manipulated to sell products. I started this communication as a simple investigation into the evidence for a product as they claim. What I found was a collection of companies willing to provide you the evidence you want so you can claim what you want for your product that (probably) does nothing.
Anyway, I can’t get to the evidence for the Snoring Ring. I haven’t found the paper with details of the trial and so I am going to complain to the ASA about their website claims. Watch this space.
I am fully aware that I am going to come across as an asshole in this piece but this sort of thing really annoys me. This is a special allowance given to a group of people who “sincerely believe” that they must fast during a particular time of the year. Now, it’s not just Islam that is catered for. Christianity gets Easter breaks for schools moved around every year just because they “sincerely believe” that something special happened two thousand years ago not on that date.
Here’s my thought process.
Clearly god does not exist. If god did exist then how come all the books written for him by messengers are different and contain different messages. This is not my only argument against god but it is clearly a human invention. Show me your proof and I promise I will believe, I’m happy to wait.
As god does not exist all religions are bullshit. They are just codified ways of treating each other (or hating women, foreigners, gays, the disabled etc if you have really read them).
Therefore all “sincerely held beliefs” are bullshit. No state should tolerate them being used as excuses for special treatment.
Now that seems extreme but in reality it means everyone gets treated the same. The same rules apply to one and all. I utterly fail to understand how you can tell what a “sincerely held belief” is. How do you know someone has that? If I want every Wednesday off work because the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster deems that necessary everyone would laugh at me.
That’s not a real religion.
They would say.
How the fuck can you tell?
Would be my response.
It’s a bit like Donald Trump claiming he’ll stop all muslims entering the USA. How the fuck can you tell who is a muslim? Do you ask them? How do you know they aren’t lying. What do you have to do to be a true muslim? How can you prove you are a true jew? How do you tell someone that you are a devoted christian? This is the “no true scotsman” fallacy. You can’t tell this stuff.
Let’s stop asking for changes for groups of people because of “special pleading” or “sincerely held beliefs”. I don’t like the idea that once one group gets special treatment then all the others should get it too. Let’s just treat everyone the same and call this treatment out for what it truly is: bullshit.
On the 2nd January 2016 I went to a Not New Year’s Eve party at Electrowerkz venue in Angel. Sally and I had been before to this event and really enjoyed it, details here.
Quality night out with @trusmoov Electrowerkz.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 3, 2016
We left home around 21:45 after spending a while getting ready in our outfits. There exist pictures from our previous outing but there are none of this visit. I had black nail varnish again and silver stripes over my bald head. We arrived near Electrowerkz about an hour later after driving in to Angel and parking on someone’s drive using the website Just Park. It’s not even a five minute walk to the venue. It was brilliant to be there again, it’s a really nice atmosphere, plenty of costumes, plenty of not-costumes and much good natured chatter and dancing.
There was quite a lot on and I was looking forward to seeing Shiv-r. I had downloaded two albums by them about a month before and I liked it. I also wanted to see the suspension performance piece in the courtyard.
Here’s what went on that night.
I was mostly interested in the Theatre of Sin shows. They were pretty good. The two bands were good. Pretty Addicted were great and had a punky sound with a female vocalist. Shiv-r were a slight let down live, the frontman wasn’t as good as the singer from Pretty Addicted even though the music was more my style. I missed Mynxie Monroe as Sally and I were probably exploring the main areas of Electrowerkz. There are quite a few rooms and each has a bar attached.
The courtyard has a bar shaped like a tube train and the exit to the smoking area along with a staircase up the back of the building which gets to the cloakroom right at the top. There’s a room downstairs where Purefuckingindustrial was hosted, it was good music, very much my new stuff, see this communication.
If you move up the stairs, past the area where they were showing Game Of Thrones episodes on a large screen, you see phrases painted on the wall. These are from the film Aliens and I think it’s a great touch to give the place some atmosphere.
Turn right from the landing and you enter an Alien themed bar and through that you get to the Hellfire room. Good stuff in here a DJ playing a good mix of music.
Keep going through the Hellfire room and head up a small flight of stairs to end up in the “aircraft” bar. I think this is modelled on an airplane but it’s hard to tell really. There are aircraft windows up on the wall and (not very) engine looking lights suspended from the ceiling. But, it’s a bar and we managed to be given an extra beer in here by mistake. Once through some more doors you end up in what I would call the main venue. It’s a small hall with a stage at one end. This is the top floor or the Theatre of Sin for the purposes of ClubAC.
Although Shiv-r hadn’t finished their set Sally and I went to the courtyard to see the dying mermaid from Cynth Icorn. There are videos available on the interwebs if you search, the one I found was on Vimeo. It was very curious to watch. A girl was suspended from the ceiling using two hooks through the skin by her shoulder blades. I think I understand now that skin is pretty tough stuff. I’m guessing it hurt quite a bit and towards the end of the performance you could see it was very tiring working against the pain. I was going to put a picture in here but you are intelligent enough to know whether you want to see it or not and can use the internet yourself.
Once it got to about 0400 we decided to head home. We both got goodie bags on the way out although mine was just an envelope and Sally’s was an envelope in a bag so I guess hers was a proper goodie bag. We got home around 0500 and went to sleep. It was a great night. Good people, brilliant outfits, reasonably cheap drink and excellent shows. Can’t wait to go again.
Oh, the title of this communication. The first visit to ClubAC was easy to title as Sally muttered fucking stairs a lot over the evening. This time there weren’t any major complaints, she had mentioned her trousers slipping down a couple of times, hence the title of this communication.
I recently went to see The Danish Girl at Cineworld in Rochester. We were in screen 8 which means comfy seats and a nice auditorium. Sally hadn’t been in there before and was somewhat shocked at the tables between the seats downstairs and the size of the chairs upstairs. The rail in front of the front row upstairs was slightly too high to allow proper slouching in the seat.
As ever I rated this film on IMDB and you should read my page explaining ratings here.
I rated The Danish Girl (2015) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/TzYIfvjkaS
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 2, 2016
So, this was a good film. It was very enjoyable and it is surprising how good and effeminate Eddie Redmayne is. This is a film about tolerance and understanding, it has lessons that much of the world could use to understand their population. All these countries with non-liberal views should just fuck off this planet.
So, the film. It’s worth watching. What I would definitely recommend is that you then read the Wikipedia pages about Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. The real story is far more interesting than the film and more fascinating. You should also check out this page of Gerda’s art.